Free Republic

COLUMBUS IS OURS -- Let us rejoice! A Happy Columbus Day for All our Readers!  ¡Feliz Día de la Hispanidad!   Monastery of Sant Jeroni de la Murtra, near Barcelona, where the Catholic Monarchs welcomed Columbus back from the Indies in 1493 Now that four centuries have sped since a Ligurian first, under God's guidance, touched shores unknown beyond the Atlantic, the whole world is eager to celebrate the memory of the event, and glorify its author. Nor could a worthier reason be found where through zeal should be kindled. For the exploit is in itself the highest and...

Cardinal Coccopalmerio Announces a New Theory on Anglican Ordinations: “Something” Happens by Christopher A. Ferrara May 10, 2017 An article in The Tablet reports that Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, whom the liberal journal bills as “one of the Vatican’s top legal minds,” has called into question Pope Leo XIII’s infallibly rendered decision on the invalidity of Anglican priestly orders. As Pope Leo declared in Apostolicae Curae (1896), after considering the defects in both form and intention in the Anglican ordination rite and the consistent decisions of his own predecessors: “Wherefore, strictly adhering,...

Pope Leo XIII, born in 1810, is credited with being the founder of Catholic social teaching. (CNS/Library of Congress) By Carol GlatzCatholic News Service VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Going by the pseudonym "X," Pope Leo XIII anonymously crafted poetic puzzles in Latin for a Roman periodical at the turn of the 19th century. The pope created lengthy riddles, known as "charades," in Latin in which readers had to guess a rebus-like answer from two or more words that together formed the syllables of a new word. Eight of his puzzles were published anonymously in "Vox Urbis," a Rome newspaper...

What are we to make of the 20th Century? Like any period it is marked with its glories and its horrors. In his now classic work Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson gives a sober assessment of the 20th century and estimates, many think conservatively, that 100 million died in war and for ideological reasons in that violent century. Perhaps no century can be said to have been bloodier.It was a century of the imposition of every sort of collectivism from communism, fascism, tribalism, and socialism , all with catastrophic results. Whole populations were the subject of social experiments; and here...

A reader alerted me to an interesting and insightful analysis by Pope Leo XIII of three trends that both alarmed him and pointed to future problems. He wrote of these three concerns in 1893 in the Encyclical on the Holy Rosary entitled Laetitiae Sanctae (Of Holy Joy). The Pope enunciates these three areas of concern and then offers the mysteries of the Rosary as a necessary remedy. Lets look at how the Pope describes the problems and then consider too what he sees as a solution. His teaching is in bold, italic, black. My remarks are in plain text, red.There...

The term “social justice”… is the key term and concept of Catholic social teaching … with all the other aspects of the Church’s social doctrine—the principle of subsidiarity, the just wage or the right to private property—are related to, and rely, on the existence of social justice. The term “social justice,” though common enough today, is little understood by most of those who use it—whether they consider themselves friends and practitioners of social justice, or they regard it as a suspect term of probably socialist origin. But the term does have a precise meaning. That meaning and the significance of...

There are few things more frustrating than writing a book, and then being confronted with a ceaseless stream of arguments you?ve already answered while you?re waiting for it to be published. That?s what has happened, though, with Thomas Storck?s recent attack on my Lou Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics, which stirred some controversy and healthy discussion at the time but which was in general far better received than I could have expected. My book-length treatment of the subject will be available next year, but in the meantime I offer one last installment in the ongoing debate over Catholic...

In his encyclical on The Nature of True Liberty (Libertas Praestantissimum), Leo XIII makes the remarkable claim that liberalism is diabolic in its origins. "But many there are who follow in the footsteps of Lucifer, and adopt as their own his rebellious cry, I will not serve; and consequently substitute for true liberty what is sheer and most foolish license. Such, for instance, are the men belonging to that widely spread and powerful organization, who, usurping the name of liberty, style themselves liberals" (Libertas Praestantissimum, n.14). Although the Holy Father’s comparison may seem hyperbolic, nonetheless the principles of liberalism mirror...